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I walked in with two dollars in my pocket; it was a donation-based event. Your first misstep in an unfamiliar environment is always internally laughable. In this instance, feelings were muted by expectation. The dusting of formal artistic exposure I have is a pure result of a few childhood friends. So when I was asked to write up ALT ESC’s curated show at the new Squat Gallery, I immediately saw an opportunity to mix in a favorite topic of mine; stigma.

The space set up like a longitudinal house party, a long single hallway with walled-off alcoves passing as individual rooms. My initial reaction was to treat it as is, so I snaked my way to the bar, passing two, three, now four individual exhibits. A good side eye is customary in New York, but the few I received seemed to have intent, so I explored them. I swung back around, bouncing from end to end, prodding each room like a cow, never committing to the slaughter. Finally I dove into JJ Brine’s exhibit and the feeling was literally verbalized as he broke song and turned his camera toward the three of us in the room; “I’m recording your reactions!” This immediate intimate relationship with the creator is a realization that some artists took to heart throughout; allowing their slice of the pie to be malleable. Petroleum jelly even made a dynamic appearance.

I carried this outlook throughout the show, compartmentalizing observations between the work, bystander reaction to the work and the corresponding creator reaction. Most didn’t seem to share my view on viewing, not even the two individuals

Alt Esc

comfortably stepping on Ryan Oskin’s creation in search of an elusive selfie. Ryan’s room sent me through two portals simultaneously; a shipping crate with suspended stills and a dramatized New York crime scene. Either way, the suspended installation created a unique experience that I donated a considerable amount of time to.

One of ALT ESC’s stated goals: “there should be a middle ground between presenting good content and having this holier than thou attitude.” What Alternative Escape provided, from a kook’s perspective, was an acceptance of healthy snap judgements that can only be captured through physical interaction and reaction. They chose a venue that exasperated the feeling through its tight quarters and diversity of medium. Akin to a Native American view on game, Alison and Irina used the entirety of the converted brownstone, promoting community through intimacy and alternative artistic experience.

Malcolm Lomax and Dan Wickerham provided a duality that chronicled the accumulation a shared apartment table receives after a productive weekend, coupled with a look inside the opening of a caged mind.

Alt Esc

The juxtaposition to me: a piece highlighting substances often hitched to creativity with a wall installation depicting the peace some artists find within those substances. Nick DeMarco’s installation elicited the magic sense of reality that only Bo Bartlett tends to capture in me; subjects so familiar and foreign, in competing perspectives. You could imagine three fish swimming together. You could even imagine you’re in the depths of ship, a window too high to peer out, but knowing that aquatic life is teaming all around you. Now just remove the structure of the ship. Now we’re on an invisible ship watching three ordinary fish steaming on by, and I don’t even know if the window was part of the installation.

As I finally strolled upstairs, the expansion of medium excited me. Frankly, the scanning exhibit overrode much of my previous approaches to deciding, internally and with naivety, what studio art is and can be. It was a simple flatbed scanner set up at face height. Distortions could be achieved through movement and interaction. The possibilities were guided with a gentle hand by its creator, Jonathan Checler. The images were projected on large screens across the way. It was another exhibit that elicited a feeling that the observer’s reaction was being judged, because it was, and was subsequently recorded. The playfulness and exuberance that Jonathan was having with his exhibit was inspiration to not take ourselves too seriously. It was welcome icing to my experiential cake.

From my collective experience and the layers of thought I’ve piled on to that experience, there is a certain stigma to all art, no matter the medium, content or location. This self-perpetuating aberration is a result of the concept that anything and everything can be art given the right argumentative properties; precluding laymen to stay far, nervous to offend, gawk or disagree. To the extent that Alison and Irina are attempting to document a strong, proud artistic community with the caveat of inclusion of medium and audience, they are doing a tremendous job through ALT ESC and their collaborators.

+ Squat Gallery is run by Tyrell Winston; this was the first exhibition

I was locked on the miotic pupils of the most menacing of four disembodied (and ostensibly enflamed, or at the very least fuming) heads adrift in what was very deliberately nowhere, when the refrain for “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” hit me from the bar’s ceiling. I wondered for a second if it might just be my own snotty musical tastes that rendered this coupling so vividly absurd—let me defend myself; this was the George Thorogood version—or if there could actually be something innately funny about engaging with the challenges of a thoughtful piece of fine art in a venue devoted to the dulling of the mind.

Onto the next painting—which, by virtue of a threesome of storybook ducklings making a meal of a contorting man’s innards, rang paradoxical enough without even the help of George’s bittersweet rasp—and I found a third sense stimulated. The inimitable aroma of bar food, one both appetizing and threatening (another paradox!), waded out from the table of diners seated directly below the canvas.

Again, I considered that my own gastronomical aversion to buffalo wings may be what anchored the smell so far from the element of the pictures I had come to observe. Or could I justifiably pass the buck to the establishment of art show culture that had confined its subjects’ aural and olfactory companies to strings, cheese cubes, and red wine? Author of this ideology or not, I was clearly all too beheld to it, unconsciously annotating every glimpse of artist Ben Campbell’s pieces with an asterisk. How was I expected to appropriately engage with such provocative paintings when standing at arm’s reach of a frenetic Mario Party tournament?

This question became especially prevalent when I reached my favorite of Campbell’s works:
one of ghoulish, horned face sprouting from the misery of a desert landscape.But it was during a later battle of wits with the figure’s dead eyes that I’d win my answer. Having long given way to my inability to properly wrestle with the images while under the duress of the anxieties and distractions I’ve always shouldered upon committing myself to a night in a bar, I conceded instead to the caliber of chitchat I’ve always relied on to stave off my demons during such nights. Movie talk, mostly.

And, in the tradition of my lifetime of paralyzing social outings, I eventually found myself yielding verbal contribution to the conversation that swept my table.
The friends I had arrived with chatted easily with a relative stranger about the history of police violence in Los Angeles. The artist himself chimed in when asked to divulge the mindset that accompanied one particular painting: a faceless naked man falling upside down through yet another harrowing nowhere. Eventually, as it always does, the conversation moved onto Mario Party.
Conceding no formidable education in psychology, American social history, or any game that came out after 1996, I kept largely silent, allowing for my ritual absent glance around thebusy room. Inevitably, my eyes landed again on the chilling face illuminating her desert home to eternal dusk. Squinting between heads and glasses to catch the eye of my distressingly humane monster, I was only then forced to admit yet another area of cerebral deficiency: where, why, and with whom art belongs.

I couldn’t tell you what I may have gathered from a head-to-head to Campbell’s pieces in a well lit and silent gallery, a locale where my motionless ruminations wouldn’t have been at the expense of many the high-speed bar back. But I can tell you that a cockeyed and cloudy peep of that nightmare humanoid growing inscrutably from the dead sand,scored to some forgettable ’80s hit and snippets of my friends’ assessment of a recent viewing of Straight Outta Compton, tore me away from my own pretensions with just enough a reason to assert that this painting did work just fine where it was. Because right then, I liked it.

-Ben Campbell’s work will remain on display at Lantern Hall through September 2016.

Have you ever wanted to see what it’s like to hang out inside a lava lamp for an hour or so? Perhaps a lava lamp that sat on the shelf of a favorite psychedelic mascot like Jim Morrison or Ken Kesey – Yes? Well if you have, then this is the place for you…

The Dream House was created in 1993 by husband and wife – composer La Monte Young and visual artist Mariah Zanzeela. The couple was greatly inspired by classical indian vocal techniques and together founded the Theater of Eternal Music. This project explored effects of long form drone sounds and involved collaborations with many well known avant garde video artists, composers, and singer song writers such as John Cale – a founding member of the Velvet Underground. The exhibit has been described as an exercise of all the senses and exists in an empty apartment on the 3rd floor of a building in Tribeca.

It was a Friday night and before the exhibit I decided to meet up with my friend Shannon and her friend Christie. It was crab cakes at Westville to vodka sodas on Elizabeth street where I played a less than glorified game of pool and smoked cigarettes with a boy who claimed I smile too much. It’s very unlike me to leave a bar early but at 10pm I decided I’d finish my melted cocktail and head to the exhibit id been dreaming about for months (no pun intended).

I originally found out about The Dream House after seeing a magenta glow from the installation on the street in college. It wasn’t until my job moved down to Soho that I realized it was A. still open and B. so close.

I had my cab drop me on the corner of Orchard and walked through the bitter cold to the front door only to be greeted by a broken buzzer and a paper flyer with instructions that read “buzz floor 3 or call this number”. After attempting both suggestions several times with frozen fingers and no answer, a loud buzzzzzzz came through the intercom and I was given access to a steep white staircase. At the top I was greeted by a friendly, long haired attendee or “gate keeper” as I like to call them, who calmly and almost therapeutically instructed me to remove my shoes and avoid participating in any photography (bummer). He presented me with the suggested donation of $5 and while trying to unzip my boot without alluding to the fact that I had a strong buzz going on we discussed information on how to volunteer for his position. As I prepped to enter the room I felt a certain vibration coming from the walls and the dusty hardwood floors. The attendee opened the door to the space and I was hit almost immediately with the scent of incense. The sound pulsating from the empty apartment was a haunting hum that throbbed with a frequency similar to that of white noise, however slightly more palatable. I took a step into the space, placed both feet on the soft white carpet, and the door was shut behind me.

Upon entering you are bathed in a mix of pinkish purple lighting and given the option to go left into a larger room or right into a smaller room. I chose right and floated into an area where one of Mariah’s geometric sculptures lived and pillows leaned against the base boards. After adjusting to the sensory overload I continued to the opposite end of the narrow hallway passing a sign on the wall that read “The Dream House” forwards and backwards.

In the larger room there were several bodies horizontally positioned across the floor – resting their heads on the pillows provided by the installation. Some were resting alone while others laid coupled, holding hands or tangling legs. No one spoke and at times I had to question whether certain people were breathing. There was a shrine on one of the walls set for Pandit Pran Nath – a Hindustani classical singer who strongly influenced Young and Zanzeela’s work. After observing the alter and the giant amps in each corner of the room that were producing the psychedelic pulse, I chose my place on the ground and followed suit. The slightest movement would alter how you processed the humming in the room and it was so intense at a level closer to the ground that I felt slightly nauseous although some of that nausea probably had to do with the 3 beverages I decided to hang out with previous to the visit. Out of respect to the artists I tried to keep my photo snapping to a minimum and after blindly pointing my cell phone towards the suspended swirled cut outs hanging from the ceiling, I rolled to my left side and rested in fetal position. I found that the humming went from irritating and invasive to soothing and womb like which not only comforted me, but made me want to stay. I could have potentially slept there if not for the fact that the attendee would be waking me up atmidnight telling me The Dream House does not function as an Airbnb.

At first laying between two couples created a sense of loneliness which soon shifted into a moment of solitude – are we actually ever ALONE in this city? As I tossed and turned noting the effect of my motion on the sound, I thought a lot about concepts of public and personal space. I remember doing studies in college on “spaces” and how they categorized themselves based on intentions of use, who inhabited them, and what part they played in the flow of life. Concepts of place or space are strongly perceived by the elements that create it. Our understanding of the function of a space is usually related to the presence of mobility and communication at that specific moment we are present within it. We as individuals (whether living on our own or with 6 roommates) are faced with moments of being “alone” in extremely public places everyday i.e. commuting on the subway, washing your clothes at the laundromat, or waiting at a bar for a friend. Utilizing this space as a think tank brought to mind the idea of something deeper than physical “place” – somewhere in which you are not communicating or mobilizing with second or outside parties, but communicating and mobilizing internally. An existence of “mental place” in a public space – public meditation – something that requires extreme concentration, or a visit to the Dream House.

Ok – back to earth…

All in all the time spent at Young and Zanzeela’s installation was enjoyable and completely worth the late night visit. The combination of sound and light created stimulation of all the senses and allowed for a one of a kind experience. At times I was waiting for someone to pass around a tray of Kool-aid and ask me to wear all white however the hour spent in the exhibit allowed me to sit with my own thoughts without any distractions, something that is rare in this busy city. I would recommend going at night in order to appreciate the intensity of the visuals and whether you bring a partner is up to. I’m sure – like the ever changing perception of the piece – the experience will be unique for everyone.

Check out The Dream House – located @ 275 Church Street – open from 2pm-12am Wednesdays through Sundays